I have a Lenovo T410 laptop which I regularly back up with IFW to an external disk connected via eSATA. I tried to do the same after booting from an IFD CD but had to resort to a USB connection as the external drive was not visible to IFD when connected to the eSATA port. Did I do something wrong, or does IFD simply not support eSATA?

IFD does support eSATA drives via the BIOS or AHCI if it shows up. For access via the BIOS the BIOS has to support it and the drive has to be attached and powered up when the computer boots.

Have you tried both the BIOS mode and BIOS (direct)?

Does the eSATA drive show up in the BIOS?

Do you know what mode the eSATA controller is using (for example, IDE or AHCI)? You might try switching it and see if helps. If the same controller is used for the internal drive make sure to switch it back before booting Windows.

You could also give IFL a test run. It may work without
making any changes at all.

Mary

On 10/28/2011 11:08 PM, aussieboykie wrote:
> I have a Lenovo T410 laptop which I regularly back up with IFW to an external disk connected via eSATA. I tried to do the same after booting from an IFD CD but had to resort to a USB connection as the external drive was not visible to IFD when connected to the eSATA port. Did I do something wrong, or does IFD simply not support eSATA?
>
> Regards, AB

mjnelson99 wrote:You could also give IFL a test run. It may work without making any changes at all.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mary. IFL does see the external drive connected via eSATA. However, I need to do some more testing. When I started a full backup using IFL the estimated time to complete hovered around 2 hours (I killed the backup as I could not wait that long). The last time I used IFW with the same source/target the backup time taken was under 1 hour. The contents of the source disk have changed but I'd be very surprised if the magnitude of the changes are sufficient to double the IFW backup time. I will conduct some proper comparison testing and report back.

Regards, AB

Edit: I believe I know why the projected IFL backup time was so long. The source drive is protected by PGP encryption (corporate directive). By arranging the Windows security drivers in the right sequence, IFW/Phylock is configured to backup without encryption, so only in-use sectors are written to the target drive. IFL sees the source disk as encrypted and therefore has to back up all sectors, whether or not they are in use.